


months of courage, minutes of (accidental) execution

by sybris



Series: Tumblr Prompts [1]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Identity Reveal, for anon, pretty general, very minor course language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 03:12:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7741117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybris/pseuds/sybris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marinette made an oopsie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	months of courage, minutes of (accidental) execution

**Author's Note:**

> for the anon that sent me this on tumblr

To be perfectly honest, the only word running through Marinette’s mind was _fuck,_ but her mother would yell at her if she actually said it out loud.

It was nearing the end of the school year – of their last year – and Marinette still hadn’t gathered up the balls to confess to Adrien.

So, okay, maybe she was panicking a little bit.

… A lot bit.

Okay, so maybe she was _freaking out_ because she had _barely any time left_ to actually confess to Adrien. They were graduating in only a few months, and if she hadn’t managed to tell Adrien how she felt in the last year or so, then how the heck was she meant to do it in just a few short months?

A finger jabbed into her side, and Marinette jumped with a pretty undignified yelp. She twisted, Ladybug-yoyo poised in her hand as she jumped away from the assailant, and she just barely stopped herself from stumbling off of the rooftop.

Chat Noir held his hands up in a surrender-like gesture.

Sighing, Marinette slumped down into a sitting position, pulling her knees up against her chest and folding her arms around them. She kept her gaze downcast, feeling Chat sit down next to her, felt his hand hover over her shoulder, and she felt a wave of nauseating guilt rise in her stomach.

“Sorry,” she sighed, her shoulders slumping further down towards her knees, “I was thinking about sh- stuff.”

She could almost feel Chat raising an eyebrow at her. “Stuff?”

Marinette waved a vague hand in a dismissive gesture. “Y’know, basic teenage drama stuff.”

“Ohh,” he dragged out the sound for longer than necessary. “Gotcha.”

Marinette physically felt the word vomit climbing her throat. She felt the panic rising in her chest, her internal being making a fair effort to stamp it out before her tears could well up with tears, but she knew the word vomit was a lost cause.

Might as well embrace it.

“So,” she paused. Felt his attention return to her. “There’s this guy at school, right, and he’s like… the most perfect being to have ever been.” She was gesticulating by the end of the sentence, the gestures carrying over to the rest of her side of the conversation. “And basically I’ve had the biggest crush on him for absolutely ages, but the thing is… we graduate in a few months, and I just… I haven’t been able to confess to him.

I think maybe I’m too scared to, though, because he is – Chat I swear if you knew him you would think the exact same thing. He is seriously the most perfect being in the history of ever, but that, of course, means that he’s also viewed like that to every other girl in the entirety of Paris, but that’s not really the point. The point is that I’m nothing like him.”

Marinette heard Chat take in a breath to say something, but she cut him off. “Don’t say anything. You don’t know me. The real me.” She sighed, heavy, with sagging shoulders and furrowed eyebrows, “You only know Ladybug. You don’t know _me.”_

They sat in silence. Swallowing, suffocating silence.

“Who is he?” Chat was the first to pick up the conversation again, and Marinette couldn’t really pinpoint how relieved she was that she didn’t have to.

Slowly, Marinette felt her lips curl into a smile. “He’s the best. He’s sweet and kind and attractive and popular and he’s a model, y’know, and he does fencing and he’s actually really good at it and he’s actually pretty famous and he’s just… he’s perfect, Chat.”

Her face dropped into the furrowed brow. “And of course he wouldn’t go for me.”

Marinette could’ve sworn she heard Chat gulp, but she shrugged it off.

“What’s…” he seemed unsure of how to finish the sentence, a heavy coating of fear lacing his words. “What’s his name?”

Marinette cast him a sideways glance.

“It’s… Adrien Agreste. Why?”

… Okay, that time she was sure she heard him gulp.

Add the fact that he was very pointedly Not Looking at her, and she felt suspicion boiling in her stomach.

He was wringing his hands together, intertwining his fingers with each other and rubbing his hands and overall _fidgeting,_ and she couldn’t help but sit up.

Slowly, as though bracing himself, Chat took a deep breath.

“Uhh,” he said smartly, “Okay, so, hypothetically speaking, what would you do if…”

“If?”

“… If _I_ was Adrien?”

Marinette snorted. It was the sort of snort that eventually grew into full blown laughter; stomach aching laughter, laughter that forced tears into your eyes and made it hard to breathe.

She struggled to get her laughter under control.

“Chat,” she began, a few giggles escaping, “if you were Adrien Agreste, I swear to God, I… I don’t even know what I’d do, it’s so absurd!”

But… some small part of Marinette buried deep into her mind, crawling and crashing and burning its way to the forefront, the small part spreading doubt in her mind that she tried to cover with more laughter, trilling continuously, “But what if it’s true?” like some sort of weird chant, and it was so prominent that Marinette couldn’t push it aside.

Slowly, Marinette worked her way down from the laughter.

Only to be make direct eye contact with the person who used to be Chat Noir but was now very much _not._

… Welp, her mother was going to kill her.

Marinette couldn’t help the way she shrank back. There he was, not Chat Noir, but very much _Adrien Agreste,_ and she used whatever little determination to live to swallow down the nausea that was climbing up her oesophagus.

And all Adrien could do, in this beyond awkward moment, was _wave._

“Uh, hello,” he said, his voice shaking, gaze darting around Marinette’s face. Awkwardly, he thrust out his hands in the universal ‘tada!’ gesture, and said, voice cracking, “Surprise!”

Marinette was going to be sick.

“This is a joke.” She muttered under her breath. “This has got to be a joke.”

Her gaze whipped around frantically, looking for something, anything to tell her that it was all some big joke. Maybe the real Chat Noir had set it up. Was it April? Was it the first of April? Damn, she couldn’t remember.

“My Lady,” Adrien whined, his voice desperate, shaking, and when she turned around to look at him again, his hands were out in front of him in a submissive sign. “Please.”

Marinette’s head was reeling. She couldn’t form words. She couldn’t form sounds. She couldn’t form thoughts.

But apparently she didn’t have to, because her traitor of a subconscious had it all covered!

“No, this can’t be right,” she was saying before she really registered the words, “This can’t be right. You’re… Adrien Agreste, the most perfect boy in the history of boys, there is no way you could be Chat Noir! There’s no way!”

She was growing frantic, but she couldn’t stop herself, even if she wanted to.

“This can’t be right! You’re not meant to be Chat Noir! You’re too perfect to be Chat Noir! And… oh, Lord have mercy, I just confessed to you without meaning to! Me! Marinette! Just confessed to _you!_ Oh, gosh, just kill me-“

Her words settled on her mind just a fraction too late.

Adrien’s jaw had dropped. His eyes were the size of dinner plates, and never in her entire life had she ever wished for the world to open up below her and swallow her whole more than in that very moment.

“You’re…” he started, hand moving to comb through his ~~perfect~~ hair. “… Marinette…?”

Lord have mercy on her soul.

**Author's Note:**

> send me more prompts on my [tumblr](pedoseidon.tumblr.com)


End file.
